Combined Army (Avatar) listbuilding for CanCon2017

I have this weird feeling that the Avatar can actually win at all missions because people are never ready for an Avatar list in anything except annihilation, but especially not in missions that otherwise seem to require a lot of specialists, like supplies and antenna field. It's just not worth preparing specifically for it when every other list will be so different. Yet despite killing all of our opponent's specialist, my mate and I recently lost a team game to an Avatar in Engineering deck because it stole our specialists and pressed the buttons with them. Every time I look at my lists for just about any missions I think, "an Avatar would wreck me". This is doubly the case because you usually only have one or two units that could stand up to an Avatar, and the speculo can take them out often with no worries (e.g. she crushes Zoe and Interventors, and with a WIP roll she can start behind a Hsien and kill it in CC with stealth).

Military Orders list-building for CanCon2017

Military orders went from being just above average to being top-tier after HSN3. The major change was that magister knights could join Hospitaller links. This dropped the price of that link by 60 points at no cost in effectiveness. Indeed, it is arguably more effective now. You have a HMG with a base BS of 17 (hits on a 20 in the good range band - on 11s with 5 dice against a TO camo sniper in cover!), a WIP13 Doctor surrounded by cubes with a MULTI rifle for fierce suppression, and 3 panzerfausts and light shotgun magisters for amazing ARO action. The magisters also have Hyper dynamics so the whole team dodges on 14 or better. Combined with 2W and ARM3 or 4, this team is extremely hard to kill, especially in a bunker.

How I play Nomads

I want to address four themes in terms of the Nomad style: assymetric match-ups, midfield control, orders and tricksy shenanigans.

How to Play Steel Phalanx

As always, I think Steel Phalanx is one of the best factions to be taking to CanCon. They've just got everything you want except a flood of infiltrating specialists, and the missions where you really want that, like Tic-Tac-Toe, don't feature in the CanCon mix. They don't have all the things on my Antenna field wishlist, but they bring other tools that make up for it. Here is what I was thinking:

Yu Jing listbuilding for CanCon 2017

Yu Jing was one of my first thoughts for Cancon 2017 because they have the units to hold buttons in Antenna Field. These units need to have some combination of the following, though preferably all of them:

Club Tournament Report 2016

The Blood Angels took the field over the weekend in our annual club tournament, which might be the last time I play Warhammer for a very long while. I had some wins, everyone was friendly, but this game is just not right anymore, as we shall see.

MOAB Tournament Report

I took the Onyx contact force. I went 4-2, finishing 5th out of 17, equal third. The only players I lost to came 1st and 2nd, and they were both close games (indeed, if Unidrons could go prone, I would have won the second). 

                               

I went to MOAB hoping to play some tough opponents and hold my own. Did that in spades, so I'm happy with the result and won't be second guessing my theories as much anymore. All the games were great fun against great people, which is one of the best things about the Infinity Community in Australia - no salty, anal retentive, rules lawyering dickheads trying to see a millimetre of your silhouette like in Warhammer.

Playtesting the Onyx Contact Force for MOAB

Onyx Contact Force listbuilding for MOAB

The Mother of All Battles Gaming festival will, as usual, have an Infinity event this year (longest running Infinity event in Australia). It's going to be a grueling 6 round tournament with only around 20 players, meaning that losing doesn't necessarily spell a fall from the top rankings because your opponent might in turn get beat. As such, having one mission that you aren't great at isn't a disaster as long as you're really strong on the others.

This is good because the mission selection is quite unusual (more in a moment). Complicating matters is that the organisers have decided to incentivise elite lists by giving commanders who only bring 10 order count lists an extra command token each game and 1 extra battle point for the entire tournament. To be frank, I'm happy about this, because 10 orders is hard to win with and the help isn't much, and it means I get to play against more lists I can swamp and run over.

MOAB Mission analysis

I'm writing this just to refresh my thinking ahead of the tournament on the weekend. MOAB has a very strange mix of missions that almost all require bringing a specific list for. There is the added spin of a bonus to single combat group lists. Some of the missions - rescue, frontline, biotechvore, engineering deck - and the 1 combat group bonus makes me think there will be a lot of HI link teams over the weekend. How to kill those? An assault hacker for oblivion and some sneaky missile launchers that can clip more than 1 guy at a time.

Blood Angels list for club tournament

Our annual friendly club 40K tournament is on the horizon. I'm going for my hatrick of best themed and don't care much for actually winning games, but this list has been okay in playtesting. I don't think you can do much better with the Baal Strike Force in 1500 points. Stormravens are nice and all but you can't have ~400 points off the board for 2 turns in Maelstrom.

Hobby: Sanguinary Guard

Club 40K tournament is coming up in a couple of weeks and I'm hard at work painting blood angels. I've got a display board planned with some skulls coming out of a hillside and a graveyard in the valley using pieces from my board from two years ago.

JSA Listbuilding for MOAB

Let's start with a mission analysis. MOAB has a very weird mix of missions. Frontline and tic-tac-toe are at opposite ends of the kill-specialist spectrum, and biotechvore, rescue and nimbus zone all kind of require their own list.

How to use snipers in Infinity

This is really two posts in one. The first is a general treatise on what makes a good sniper. The second is how to set up a kill box. This is a space where enemies take multiple AROs from your defensive pieces. It is relevant to everybody, but particularly to lists with multiple sniper type units, like QK with TR bots, almost all combined army lists, some SP lists with Agema, Atalanta and Pheonix, and of course, Tohaa.

Thoughts on beating the top factions in Infinity part 1: Qapu Khalki

Infinity is an extremely well balanced game but a couple of the factions stand out as being just that little bit better than everyone else: Steel Phalanx and Qapu Khalki on the link-team side, and Nomads and Ariadna on the vanilla side. The link team factions win by dominating face-to-face rolls thanks to great stat-lines, big link teams and MSV2 or ODD, while the vanilla factions get ahead with streamlined units and midfield domination consisting of mines, good snipers, lots of camouflage and some crazy koalas.

5 fabulous units in Infinity

I was originally going to call this 'The 5 BEST units in Infinity', but best is a bit too arbitrary and I will probably want to write other similar posts down the road, so I'm going with fabulous.

Yu Jing Lieutenants

Just some quick thoughts on lieutenants for Yu Jing. Let's start with the options:

Competitive Warhammer is so bad right now

I only play 40K for fun these days. I can't bothered keeping up with the rules, the game is massively imbalanced, tournaments enforce WSIWYG instead of TWNCTAWP (i.e. this would not confuse the average Warhammer player) when it comes to things like having sniper scouts as boltgun scouts, and the game is basically over by the end of turn 2, if not by the end of deployment. The game has also degenerated into rock-paper-scissors. 

Hobby: Karakuri Special Project

Long time without a post, but nobody is reading so whatever. I won't be posting Infinity tactics anymore, just hobby. Warhammer 40000 is something I only play for fun now; I will write a separate post on why. This is something I finished recently that I'm happy with. 

Theory Hammer: Aragoto Senkenbutai (JSA bikers)

I’ve noticed that a lot of JSA lists use the bikes (not Yojimbo mind you, usually just the regular dude with a spitfire). They can wreak havoc in a backfield if you’re not careful, but it seems to me that they should only be effective against someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Let me explain.

What are the almost top-tier factions in Infinity

These are very strong factions capable of winning any tournament, even against the top-tier lists, but they are missing one piece of the puzzle. Before reading this article you should probably read part 1 - what makes a strong faction, part 2 - who sucks, and part 3 - who is average, if you haven't already. 

These are very strong factions capable of winning any tournament, even against the top-tier lists, but they are missing one piece of the puzzle. 

What are the average factions in Infinity?

You'll want to read part 1 (what makes a good faction) and part 2 (which factions suck) if you haven't already, before reading this article. 

1. Most Vanilla lists. With all that variety you can usually throw together enough of the good stuff to make a solid list - some infiltrating, camouflaged specialists, a good sniper with MSV2 and BS13+ or camo, a good primary attack piece with MSV, a good secondary attack piece with ODD and a few other bits and pieces, like smoke or a ninja. For the most part though, Vanilla lists lose out to the sectorials that don't sacrifice one of the priority items for link teams.

What are the worst factions in Infinity?:

If you haven't read part 1 in this series, do so first. 

1. Combined Army. It is unclear to me how these guys are supposed to be played.

The Avatar is awesome but struggles in anything other than annihilation because 130 points are tied up in one unit. In area control missions that means you struggle to get more than 2 quadrants, and in specialist flood missions like emergency transmission you have very few points left-over for specialists. 

The makings of a strong faction

Infinity is a very balanced game, but there are still good and bad lists. The following makes a lot of points regarding what makes on faction better/worse than another and why. I will follow up with articles on which factions suck, are average, are borderline and are top tier. 

Qapu Khalki Tactica

I mostly play Yu Jing, Qapu Khalki and Tohaa. Tohaa is a playtesting army, Yu Jing is my campaign army and Qapu is my principle competition faction (Tohaa struggles in some missions). This is a description of my basic approach to playing Qapu.

I am moving to Qapu Khalqi

So I am changing factions to the Haqqislam sectoral effective immediately. They have everything I want in a list. Check this out!

An MSV2 link team with HMG!? Yes please!

Yu Jing attack piece review #1: Hac Tao, Hsien, Rui Shi and Su Jian

I thought I'd go over some of the main attack pieces in Yu Jing to explain how/why I would/wouldn't use each of them. This is the first in the series. Generally in infinity I think you want 3-5 attack pieces and 1-2 defensive pieces (i.e. snipers). There are a few considerations for each. Yu Jing doesn't really do traditional defence (your defence is to smoke dodge and shut down the table), but I'll talk about that in a future article.

Yu Jing list for ITS objective saturation missions

There are a few missions in the ITS where you need a crapload of specialists to have a chance, and good ones too. These are the ones with 6 interactables on the map requiring WIP rolls to activate. It is these missions that having given birth to the FO spam lists that Ariadna and JSA specialise in. I thought I'd write up my initial thoughts on how to tackle them with Vanilla Yu Jing.

Infinity tournament report - Yu Jing smoke shooting

I played in the Australian infinity championships over the weekend. My first Infinity tournament! It was a fantastic event. Prize support was incredibly deep (pretty much everyone got something), terrain was lush, and pretty much everyone got 100% on sportsmanship for the tournament. I went 3-1-1 without making any catastrophic errors, which I was very happy with for my first event. My friend on the other hand walked away with the champion’s trophy in his first tournament. Assault subsection is a bit much eh?

Big bad himself. The character on the newspaper means 'crime'